


Color Theory

by blahblahwhy



Category: Vantablack pigment feud RPF
Genre: Epistolary, Unconventional Format
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:03:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blahblahwhy/pseuds/blahblahwhy
Summary: True black looks like Nothing. It looks like a hole in the fabric of space.





	Color Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wilde_stallyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wilde_stallyn/gifts).



> Note: I know neither of these artists personally, and almost none of the following is true (if unsure, check the footnotes). Then again, in Kapoor’s own words, “It seemed to me that art's all about illusion and the unreal.” So.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!

_All sets of real and color-space primaries are arbitrary, in the sense that there is no one set of primaries that can be considered the canonical set. Primary pigments or light sources selected for a given application on the basis of subjective preferences as well as practical factors such as cost, stability, availability etc. Color-space primaries can be subjected to meaningful one-to-one transformations so that the transformed space is still complete and each color is specified with a unique sum._

_\-- Wikipedia, “Primary Colors”_  

### Spoons

_From the notebook of Anish Kapoor, 1999:_

The City of Chicago has asked Me to create for them a work of Public Art.

Ate beans for supper.

Stared into mirror for customary hour, meditating on true nature of Self.

Contemplating Mirrors muchly. Reflections of reality, and yet, do they?

Reasons why mirrors do not reflect reality: 

> 1\. backwards. “mirror images.”
> 
> 2\. Any reflection is a distortion of the thing itself. There can be no truth outside of the thing itself. I am not Me when I am in a mirror, I am only Me inside of mySelf, the true Self, not when reflected in a mirror.
> 
> 3\. think of Magritte. contemplate Magritte. “ceci n’est pas un moi, simplement un miroir”

Idea: reflective bean? Think more.

 

_From an email from Stuart Semple to his mum, 1999:_

I saw the Matrix today with some mates from class. It was cool.

 

### Art created in 2009

_Anish Kapoor, Tall Tree and the Eye, installed at the Royal Academy of Art:_

Nearly 15 meters tall, the work consists of 76 mirrored spheres twisting around three axes, reflecting and refracting the natural light around it. About the work, the artist said, “This work is, in a way, a kind of eye which is reflecting images endlessly.”

“Now that it is up, I am surprised by its fragility,” he said, also calling it “mysterious” and “dignified.”1

The artwork will be installed in several locations, with spheres being added and subtracted to change the height of the overall sculpture, which will allow it to better reflect the space around it. 

_Stuart Semple, HappyClouds, performance/bubbles, vegetable dye, and helium, Tate Modern_

Literally just soap bubbles filled with helium in the shape of smiley faces. They float up into the sky, smiling at all to see.

Said Stuart Semple, “I just wanted to make a piece of art that would cheer people up a bit.”2

 

1: _The Guardian:_ "[Anish Kapoor unveils new sculpture at Royal Academy of Arts](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/anish-kapoor-sculpture-royal-academy)."

2:  _designboom:_ "[Happy Cloud by Stuart Semple](https://www.designboom.com/art/happy-cloud-by-stuart-semple/)."

 

### The artists in conversation about art

_Conversation with the Muses, Anish Kapoor, out loud in bedroom, 2014._

I have done… reflection. I have done color. Great piles of pigment on the floor.

What more would you have of me, you muses? What is next? We have married construction with sculpture and artifact and artifice and ART is art is art is not an art. I am not myself. I am of myself.

Color/Hue/Saturation/Value/Pallate /Warm/Cool/Tint

RYB is Subtractive. RGB is Additive

Earth is sculpture. Blood is paint.3

I looked to the heavens last night, looked up into the bright stars and I saw the spaces between the stars. We are drowning out the stars with light of our own, but that means. The stars are no more. Black, black, blackness, ultimate blackness.

The opposite of reflection is matte, is blackness, is darkness complete and incarnate. If I could sever a hole in the fabric of reality to place inside all of everything I would.

Muse, bring me such a tool.

 

_Stuart Semple, email to his mum, 2014_

You know, I think the best kind of art is the kind that makes people see a reflection of themselves or their own experiences. Art that people see, and it sees people back.

 

3: Quote from [this lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9JhLrvoA2Q).

 

### At this point, you are owed a little color theory.

You must have some questions. When is green not green? Does purple exist? Etc.

Color theory is the school of thought surrounding the study of color. Traditionally, there were thought to be three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), and three secondary colors (orange, purple, and green). These pigments were made with ingredients both common and uncommon, mixed with oil or other substances, into paints.

An artist, using only these three colors, might mix them in order to paint or otherwise represent what the eye sees. For instance, consider an artist who is deeply contemplating a leaf, and view their palette upon which they have placed red, yellow, and blue pigments mixed with oils. The leaf is green, but not a true green, a green with threads of yellow mixed throughout. This artist may take a palette knife and pull some of their blue and mix it with more of their yellow, scraping and stirring until they are satisfied they have captured the exact color, the color that looks right to their eyes.

In color theory circles, where the exact properties of cerulean are discussed in the finest detail, this is known as the RYB (red, yellow, blue) color model.

Aha, but now we must ask, do these colors, and, more importantly, our understanding of these colors reflect what the eye truly sees? The answer, unfortunately, is no.

Scientifically speaking, what we call color is actually our eyes’ perception of wavelengths of light, and those tend to come primarily in red, green, and blue. Yellow is nowhere to be found, you may note, and instead is created by mixing together red and green light. Red and blue together create magenta, and blue and green create cyan. Incredible.

If you are reading this on a computer screen, it is illuminated from within, and any color your eye sees is based on this RGB (red, green, and blue) color model. Here too, we run into difficulties, as the pinkest pink as perceptible by the human eye is pinker still than the pinkest pink one can see on a screen.

But this, too, is intrinsic to the nature of art. We are always limited by our materials.

One more thing: technically, neither white nor black is a color in the same way we’re speaking here. Both are achromatic colors, or colors without any hue. White is the perfect reflection of all visible light, or all the colors at once. Black is what happens if that light is absorbed.

True black looks like Nothing. It looks like a hole in the fabric of space.

In June of 2014, Anish Kapoor received a phone call.

 

### Colormen, Part 1

_Phone call from Surrey NanoSystems to Studio of Anish Kapoor, June 2014._

“Mr. Kapoor. We may have something for you.”

 

### Colormen, Part 2

Time was, artists were expected to complete each and every task associated with their art, from building frames and stretching canvas to mixing pigments with oils and egg washes to create their colors. This was time consuming and tiresome work, more akin to alchemy than art.

Eventually, there grew a new profession of the colormen. These merchants specialized in the creation and sale of paints. Before, when an artist needed some blue for the Virgin’s shawl, they had to crush up some blueberries or, if they were lucky, azurite, and hope for the best.

The colormen, now. The colormen came to town with a full rainbow of oil paints, pre-mixed and ready to go. From them, one could buy blue of the most vibrant lapis lazuli, the most sunny of yellows, the most bloody of reds.

These exact recipes for colors were guarded as closely as any trade secrets.

 

### The Optics of Purple

Purple does not, technically, exist.

That is to say that it absolutely does, as the average human can see purple, and in the RBY color model, it’s easy to make. But it is a color without a wavelength, a color not in the rainbow.

Upsettingly, mummy brown is indeed a color, a rich-dark brown, and it is made from the human remains of mummies.

Neither purple nor brown is essential to this story, but I thought it is important that you know this.

 

### The ownership of purple

3M, a major corporation selling largely paper products and technology platforms, trademarked the color purple.

If you use the color purple in a painting, however, they cannot sue you for it. That is not how intellectual property works. You must be a direct competitor with a global multinational corporation.

Are you a direct competitor of a global multinational corporation? Anish Kapoor is a direct competitor of Stuart Semple.

 

### Deepest, darkest black, a primer 

> It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.
> 
> \-- Nigel Tufnel, _Spinal Tap_
> 
> "It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!"
> 
> \-- Ford Prefect about Hotblack Desiato’s pitch black ship, _Restaurant at the End of the Universe_

As we have discussed, the color black is an absence of reflected light. The perfect black is found only in a black hole, where light is pulled in by intense gravitational forces to be crushed into a couple atoms. A near-perfect black would be a surface that has no reflection, a surface that eats light.

Imagine you are an ant, traversing through the thickest grass you've ever seen. The sun does not reach you: all its light has been absorbed and refracted well above you.

Imagine Anish Kapoor is the ant, and the grass is instead a series of nanotubes, baked into place by Surrey NanoSystems. Now you have the shape of it.

 

_Email from Stuart Semple to his mother:_

Thank you for telling me about Vantablack. What a load of bullocks, eh?

 

### Favorite

While giving a talk at the Denver Art Museum, someone asked Stuart Semple what his favorite color was.

“Vantablack,” he replied, “and I can't use it.”

That the most-perfect black would also be off-limits, serving as the ultimate metaphor for corporatization of art was just too much, Semple thought.

“What are you going to do about it?” the question-asker asked anew.

“I'm going to release my pink, but not allow Anish Kapoor to use it.”4

 

4: Quote from  _[Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/vantablack-anish-kapoor-stuart-semple/) _ article.

 

### On the ownership of pink

Purple is not the only trademarked color. In fact, the most famous trademarked color is pink, for its use in insulation.

Stuart Semple trademarked his pink (and it is truly the pinkest pink: computer screens are not bright enough to communicate how pink it is), for its use as paint, but opened the license to all, save for one:

> _By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into that hands of Anish Kapoor._

 

### Defiance

[Up yours #pink](https://www.instagram.com/p/BOWz73wgj7R/)

A post shared by [ Anish Kapoor](https://www.instagram.com/dirty_corner/) (@dirty_corner) on Dec 23, 2016 at 2:32am PST

[Instagram post featuring Anish Kapoor's middle finger having been dipped in Stuart Semple's pinkest pink.] 

 

### Colormen, part 3

#ShareTheBlack came the cry, from all corners of the land. Stuart Semple, his eyes steady on the task before him, gathered his resources and sent off samples to artists everywhere. Together, they would create a black that was as good as Vantablack. Perhaps better!

These latter-day colormen worked and collaborated with artists from other media. Just as colormen of old worked with alchemists and doctors to access the best chemicals, the colormen of now turned to makeup artists.

They had found a way to flatten the light, you see, without adding any pigment. This transparent mattifier, when mixed with bucket loads of black pigment became Black 2.0.

Black 2.0 is so black it flattens any shape to a shadow puppet of itself. It is non-toxic, such that a human (say, Stuart Semple) could put it on a finger (say, a forefinger and second finger) without harm.

Unlike Vantablack, it doesn't need to be baked on to adhere to a surface. It smells like black cherry. And it too is completely unavailable to Anish Kapoor.

### About the artist

_Stuart Semple’s About the Aritst page:_

> In 2016 Semple achieved worldwide notoriety after his release of the world’s pinkest pink pigment online and the subsequent exclusion of artist Anish Kapoor from using it. The ensuing ‘Art War’ between the two artists over colour became a conceptual performance piece about accessibility, elitism and community. His colour creations can now be found in the permanent collection of the Harvard Art Museum pigment library. 5

_Anish Kapoor’s about the artist page:_

In contrast, Anish Kapoor's _About_  page is simply a collection of some of his works. It holds no mention of his fight with Stuart Semple or Vantablack.

But not a single day goes by where he doesn't think on that, contemplating the blackest-black void both of the watch on his wrist6 and that which he sees sometimes now, when he looks in a mirror.

 

5: Stuart Semple's  _[About the Artist page](http://stuartsemple.com/about/). _ The Harvard Art Museum pigment collection hosts many historical and important pigments, including mummy brown.

6: The only current commercial use of Vantablack associated with Anish Kapoor is the [MCT S110 Evo Vantablack by Anish Kapoor](https://monochrome-watches.com/introducing-mct-s110-evo-vantablack-anish-kapoor-blackest-material-universe-black-hole/), which cost $95,000. Only 10 were produced. The black background gives the optical illusion that there is an infinite hole in the wearer's wrist. 


End file.
